Amazon's Prime subscription service costs $99 per year and provides free two-day shipping on items purchased from Amazon that display the "Prime" logo. Prime includes free shipping on Marketplace items that sellers opt to have delivered via Amazon's warehouse, but not on most third-party purchases. Even without Prime, orders over $35 include free basic shipping, but Prime can save you a good amount on shipping if you frequently place small orders or need items delivered quickly. In addition, Prime includes extras such as Prime Instant Video, a streaming video service similar to Netflix, Prime Music, which provides free streaming music, and the ability to borrow one Kindle e-book per month from the Amazon Kindle Lending Library. To start a subscription, click "Your Prime" at the top of any Amazon page.

Amazon now has more than 100 private label brands, some without the name Amazon even remotely attached, for product categories like clothing, dog food, and furniture. Yet AmazonBasics, and the Amazon Essentials clothing brand, remain the company’s biggest weapons in its war against offline retail. Just as Walmart, Target, and other stores launched their own private label brands for virtually every product imaginable, the company has done the same. (In 2015, it also launched an official Etsy competitor in the form of Amazon Homemade.)
This service isn't just for packaged goods, either. Many stores offer shoppers the opportunity to order fresh produce, meats, dairy, and other groceries online and get these items delivered directly to their homes. In addition, many products that aren't necessarily found easily in stores can be found online — sometimes for a much cheaper price. You might even be able to ​take advantage of online rewards or cash-back offers, too.
Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon (/ˈæməˌzɒn/), is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company based in Seattle, Washington, that was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994. The tech giant is the largest Internet retailer in the world as measured by revenue and market capitalization, and second largest after Alibaba Group in terms of total sales.[5] The Amazon.com website started as an online bookstore and later diversified to sell video downloads/streaming, MP3 downloads/streaming, audiobook downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. The company also owns a publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, a film and television studio, Amazon Studios, produces consumer electronics lines including Kindle e-readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo devices, and is the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services (IaaS and PaaS) through its AWS subsidiary.[6] Amazon also sells certain low-end products under its in-house brand AmazonBasics.
Amazon, seeing the obvious opportunity here, reportedly outbid none other than Google to become Twitch’s parent company three years later, with the AWS infrastructure a big part of why Twitch CEO Emmett Shear decided to take the deal. Now, four years later, Twitch has outlasted both YouTube and Facebook’s attempts to snatch away its market share and, given the popularity of titles like Epic Games’ Fortnite, has become an even more integral fixture of modern online life and youth culture. Amazon has more recently integrated Twitch into its Prime subscription, giving subscribers free games and complementary channel subscriptions.
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While Amazon was expanding into streaming video, hardware, and cloud computing, it simultaneously maintained an aggressive push into even faster shipping and all new retail formats. The company started its same-day shipping initiative, Prime Now, in New York City in 2014, and it’s since expanded it to dozens of cities around the world. Around the same time, Amazon began a program called AmazonFresh to stock and ship groceries — including vegetables and refrigerated and freezer products — that it used as a way to stay competitive with traditional big-box retailers like Walmart and Target and Uber-like logistics newcomers like Instacart. The company now sells its own line of meal kits through Fresh to rival ready-to-cook options from companies like Blue Apron and Plated.
Amazon first entered the media industry as a major online retailer in the late ‘90s. The company began by selling CDs and DVDs to a burgeoning market of online shoppers who began turning to the internet for music and movies, before the technical feasibility of streaming and the advent of the iPod. But it wasn’t until 2005, with the initial launch of Amazon Prime, that the company began laying the ground work for a future digital media ecosystem that integrated directly into its online store.

Amazon derives many of its sales (around 40% in 2008) from third-party sellers who sell products on Amazon.[129] Associates receive a commission for referring customers to Amazon by placing links to Amazon on their websites if the referral results in a sale. Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs.[130] In the middle of 2014, the Amazon Affiliate Program is used by 1.2% of all websites and it is the second most popular advertising network after Google Ads.[131] It is frequently used by websites and non-profits to provide a way for supporters to earn them a commission.[132] Amazon reported over 1.3 million sellers sold products through Amazon's websites in 2007. Unlike eBay, Amazon sellers do not have to maintain separate payment accounts; all payments are handled by Amazon.[citation needed]

A 2015 front-page article in The New York Times profiled several former Amazon employees[192] who together described a "bruising" workplace culture in which workers with illness or other personal crises were pushed out or unfairly evaluated.[11] Bezos responded by writing a Sunday memo to employees,[193] in which he disputed the Times's account of "shockingly callous management practices" that he said would never be tolerated at the company.[11]
You can save even more money by shopping with discounted gift cards. “Companies like CardCash and Raise offer gift cards up to fifty percent off, so a one-hundred-dollar gift card could be purchased for only fifty dollars,” says Conway of Slickdeals. “Some gift cards to popular merchants may be a lesser savings, but every dollar counts, especially if you're making a larger purchase.”
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While Amazon was expanding into streaming video, hardware, and cloud computing, it simultaneously maintained an aggressive push into even faster shipping and all new retail formats. The company started its same-day shipping initiative, Prime Now, in New York City in 2014, and it’s since expanded it to dozens of cities around the world. Around the same time, Amazon began a program called AmazonFresh to stock and ship groceries — including vegetables and refrigerated and freezer products — that it used as a way to stay competitive with traditional big-box retailers like Walmart and Target and Uber-like logistics newcomers like Instacart. The company now sells its own line of meal kits through Fresh to rival ready-to-cook options from companies like Blue Apron and Plated.
If your new dress doesn't fit right or a gadget arrives broken, Amazon accepts returns on most sales within 30 days of delivery. In general, third-party sellers offer the same policy, although you'll usually have to pay for return shipping to the seller unless the seller advertises free returns, whereas Amazon often provides a prepaid shipping label for its own returns. The cost of the return may be subtracted from the refund if the item was returned for some other reason than Amazon's mistake.
Amazon’s transformation into the world’s more pervasive retail operation wouldn’t be complete unless the company began a seemingly counterintuitive push from online to offline. Starting with its brick-and-mortar bookstores in 2015 — first in Seattle and now in Chicago and New York City — Amazon established its intent to compete on all fronts with its retail competitors.
That same year, the company launched Dash buttons for instant reordering of products like laundry detergent, and it’s more recently been investing in new services that let package-carrying couriers unlock the truck of your car and even your front door. Most recently, Amazon has signaled an intention to disrupt health care by purchasing online pharmaceutical startup PillPack. All of this has helped Amazon grow its North American retail operation at an unbelievable pace; annual sales for the division more than doubled from $50.8 billion in 2014 to $106.1 billion last year.
Amazon was founded in 1994 around Bezos’ desire to start an internet-based business, with the goal of selling items online emerging as an early and obvious inroad into the dot-com boom. A former Wall Street worker with electrical engineering and computer science degrees, Bezos zeroed in on books as a viable initial product category for his online store due to the universality of literature, the existing stock of print books, and the relatively low price of each unit. Bezos briefly considered naming his company Relentless.com — an early sign of the man’s tenacious business mindset — but friends and family suggested it was too malevolent sounding. Relentless.com, which Bezos bought roughly 24 years ago, still redirects to Amazon.com. The company now controls almost half of all print book sales in the US.
Yet despite having a hand in so many different industries, consumers largely trust Amazon with everything from their personal information and buying habits to the literal conversations they have in their own homes. According to a study The Verge conducted in partnership with consulting firm Reticle Research last year, Amazon is the most-liked and trusted technology brand by a wide margin. One likely explanation there is that the company has a strong relationship with its customers, thanks in part to its zealous commitment to low prices and a seemingly never-ending quest to make modern life more convenient.
While Amazon grew in the ‘90s largely thanks to its growing share of the print book market and its dominance of online book sales, it was its early investments in ebooks and e-readers that turned it into a digital publishing and book-selling powerhouse. Amazon began work on its first Kindle e-reader starting in 2004 under codename Fiona, with its internal Lab126 hardware division leading the product development process. The first device was released in November of 2007 and sold for $399. Amazon has since released numerous iterations of the Kindle, and it now dominates the e-reader market after edging out competing products from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and others.

Bezos and those he’s hired over the years have been prescient about a vast number of shifts in how people spend money, buy products, and use the internet. But none of their predictions may have panned out quite as lucratively as Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division that loans server space and other computing resources at massive profit margins.

Amazon, with its unfettered access to troves of valuable consumer and seller data, came upon a rather interesting business model around 2009, when it launched a private label division under the name AmazonBasics. It started first with the items the company noticed people most often purchased without thinking too hard about the brand name, like batteries and HDMI cables. But as The New York Times reported this past summer, this proved to be a way to fast track a fledgling product category into a massive money-making top seller — AmazonBasics’ AA batteries now outsell Duracell and Energizer on Amazon.com after just a few years.

While Amazon has publicly opposed secret government surveillance, as revealed by Freedom of Information Act requests it has supplied facial recognition support to law enforcement in the form of the "Rekognition" technology and consulting services. Initial testing included the city of Orlando, Florida, and Washington County, Oregon. Amazon offered to connect Washington County with other Amazon government customers interested in Rekognition and a body camera manufacturer. These ventures are opposed by a coalition of civil rights groups with concern that they could lead to expansion of surveillance and be prone to abuse. Specifically, it could automate the identification and tracking of anyone, particularly in the context of potential police body camera integration.[204][205][206] Due to the backlash, the city of Orlando has publicly stated it will no longer use the technology.[207]
Amazon acquired Junglee in 1998, and the website Junglee.com was launched in India in February 2012[115] as a comparison-shopping website. It curated and enabled searching for a diverse variety of products such as clothing, electronics, toys, jewelry and video games, among others, across thousands of online and offline sellers. Millions of products are browse-able, whereby the client selects a price, and then they are directed to a seller. In November 2017, Amazon closed down Junglee.com and the former domain currently redirects to Amazon India.[116]

Amazon's rules state that you must be at least 13 years of age to sign up for an account. However, you must be 18 to make a purchase (since you'll need to input this data into your account before a purchase), unless you can obtain enough money in gift card funds to pay for the purchase or receive a gift card-debit card that has a major card company attached that you can input to pay for the entire purchase price.

The Amazon sales rank (ASR) provides an indication of the popularity of a product sold on any Amazon locale. It is a relative indicator of popularity that is updated hourly. Effectively, it is a "best sellers list" for the millions of products stocked by Amazon.[134] While the ASR has no direct effect on the sales of a product, it is used by Amazon to determine which products to include in its bestsellers lists.[134] Products that appear in these lists enjoy additional exposure on the Amazon website and this may lead to an increase in sales. In particular, products that experience large jumps (up or down) in their sales ranks may be included within Amazon's lists of "movers and shakers"; such a listing provides additional exposure that might lead to an increase in sales.[135] For competitive reasons, Amazon does not release actual sales figures to the public. However, Amazon has now begun to release point of sale data via the Nielsen BookScan service to verified authors.[136] While the ASR has been the source of much speculation by publishers, manufacturers, and marketers, Amazon itself does not release the details of its sales rank calculation algorithm. Some companies have analyzed Amazon sales data to generate sales estimates based on the ASR,[137] though Amazon states:

Goodreads is a "social cataloging" website founded in December 2006 and launched in January 2007 by Otis Chandler, a software engineer, and entrepreneur, and Elizabeth Chandler. The website allows individuals to freely search Goodreads' extensive user-populated database of books, annotations, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions and discussions. In December 2007, the site had over 650,000 members and over 10 million books had been added. Amazon bought the company in March 2013.[100]
Amazon, with its unfettered access to troves of valuable consumer and seller data, came upon a rather interesting business model around 2009, when it launched a private label division under the name AmazonBasics. It started first with the items the company noticed people most often purchased without thinking too hard about the brand name, like batteries and HDMI cables. But as The New York Times reported this past summer, this proved to be a way to fast track a fledgling product category into a massive money-making top seller — AmazonBasics’ AA batteries now outsell Duracell and Energizer on Amazon.com after just a few years.
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Amazon derives many of its sales (around 40% in 2008) from third-party sellers who sell products on Amazon.[129] Associates receive a commission for referring customers to Amazon by placing links to Amazon on their websites if the referral results in a sale. Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs.[130] In the middle of 2014, the Amazon Affiliate Program is used by 1.2% of all websites and it is the second most popular advertising network after Google Ads.[131] It is frequently used by websites and non-profits to provide a way for supporters to earn them a commission.[132] Amazon reported over 1.3 million sellers sold products through Amazon's websites in 2007. Unlike eBay, Amazon sellers do not have to maintain separate payment accounts; all payments are handled by Amazon.[citation needed]
When you sign up and get approved for the Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card from Chase (no annual fee!), you'll get $50 off your next purchase instantly. Click here for more details. Collect points and coupons as you shop at Amazon and use them to redeem more Amazon goods! You can also redeem for cash back, gift cards and travel. Get 3% back at Amazon and 1-2% back elsewhere! It's a win!
In May 2018, Amazon threatened the Seattle City Council over an employee head tax proposal that would have funded houselessness services and low-income housing. The tax would have cost Amazon about $800 per employee, or 0.7% of their average salary.[202] In retaliation, Amazon paused construction on a new building, threatened to limit further investment in the city, and funded a repeal campaign. Although originally passed, the measure was soon repealed after an expensive repeal campaign spearheaded by Amazon.[203]
Use Cyber Monday to do shopping you would have otherwise done. One big benefit to Cyber Monday is that stores usually offer percent-off deals that apply across multiple product categories, so you can potentially get a discount on a wider array of items, says Palmer. “In addition to double digit discounts, it’s easy to find free shipping offers,” she adds.
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On July 5, 1994, Bezos initially incorporated the company in Washington State with the name Cadabra, Inc.[21] He later changed the name to Amazon.com, Inc. a few months later, after a lawyer misheard its original name as "cadaver".[22] In September 1994, Bezos purchased the URL Relentless.com and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, but friends told him the name sounded a bit sinister. The domain is still owned by Bezos and still redirects to the retailer.[23][24]
Bezos selected the name Amazon by looking through the dictionary; he settled on "Amazon" because it was a place that was "exotic and different", just as he had envisioned for his Internet enterprise. The Amazon River, he noted, was the biggest river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest bookstore in the world.[25] Additionally, a name that began with "A" was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of an alphabetized list.[25] Bezos placed a premium on his head start in building a brand and told a reporter, "There's nothing about our model that can't be copied over time. But you know, McDonald's got copied. And it's still built a huge, multibillion-dollar company. A lot of it comes down to the brand name. Brand names are more important online than they are in the physical world."[26]
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